Technology
A Canadian company has released the first video wall solution to deliver 6k content in real time over a standard Ethernet network. Using a single PC or server running Userful software is now able to support video walls of up to 60 screens at a time.
In an iconic scene from 1982's Blade Runner
, a flying car drifts past a pyramid-like skyscraper where incredibly large video projections advertise the products of the fictional city they inhabit. The technology to produce video on this scale has been getting closer and closer in recent years, and now a Canadian company is offering the potential to link together up to 60 display panels in a video wall system for a fraction of the price of comparable systems.Related articles
Video walls use synchronized high-resolution graphical content to an array of displays simultaneously. The technology is becoming widely used in advertising, film, museums, and broadcasting, and is about to pop up in many new places as costs continue to drop while capabilities continue to expand.Userful Corporation, which specializes in centralized computer display controller software, has recently released version 8.5 of their multiple-source video wall controller system. This update allows a single, standard PC running Userful software to support video walls of as many as 60 display screens with up to 6K resolution source content, in real time over a standard Ethernet network.
The Userful system does not require any proprietary hardware. The companyès software splits, crops, rotates and scales the content as appropriate at the server level. Furthermore, since the splitting of the video stream happens in real-time, a Userful video wall is able to utilize the network to deliver 4K content using a standard PC, and content up to 6K on a high-end PC.
Each display in a video wall uses only its corresponding portion of the content stream, making the network bandwidth more efficient overall. This means the system works as well for real-time applications as well as for programmed displays. For creative applications or to support changing demands, users can change the video wall content on the fly instead of preparing everything in advance.
The system can also perform screen rotation of content for screens set at unusual angles and artistic, non-standard layouts.
Userful's new mirroring function also supports precise synchronization of the same content across 50 or more network-connected displays and video walls. You can capture or render a single source once, an identical, synchronized 30fps video stream, and distribute over an IP network of individual zero-clients. This technique saves substantial levels of CPU, bandwidth and other costs by copying the single source to multiple displays.
Timothy Griffin, founder and CTO of Userful, describes the excitement behind this new version, “For too long cost and complexity have been drags on the video wall market. This release enables Userful’s simple and affordable video wall solution to compete on scalability and features with some of the highest end and most expensive video wall controllers on the market."
With systems like Userful's becoming more and more widespread, the vision of Blade Runner seems about to come partly true. We expect that replicants won't be far behind.
0 comments:
Post a Comment